20% of private and 11% of corporate users in Azerbaijan have faced Internet threats since early 2019

11:03 - 27.05.2019


May 27, Fineko/abc.az. Since the beginning of the year about one in five users in Azerbaijan has faced various cyber threats on the Internet and one in two with attacks of so-called local threats – those that fall on devices not from the network, but from various removable media, such as USB-drives.

Such results were obtained by Kaspersky Lab, which analyzed data on the operation of the security components of its solutions in the cloud infrastructure of Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) in the period from 1 January to 30 April of 2019.

Money remains the main motivation of cybercriminals, so one of the main tools in attacks is banking Trojans. With their help attackers are fishing users for confidential financial data: bank card number, account data in the online banking system, access data to the corporate account, etc. As Kaspersky Lab found out, since the beginning of this year about every 100th user in Azerbaijan, including employees of various organizations, has been attacked by banking Trojans.

To disguise banking Trojans and other malicious sogtware, attackers actively use social engineering methods, in particular phishing (fake web pages and messages in e-mail, messengers and social networks). The purpose in this case is to lull the user's vigilance, arouse his interest in the received letter or open page and thus make him download malware or share confidential information. According to Kaspersky Lab, 8% of Azerbaijani users faced phishing attacks in Q1 of this year.

At the same time, experts note that the vector of attacks by attackers is increasingly shifting towards organizations and primarily from the segment of medium and small businesses. According to Kaspersky Lab, in the first 4 months of this year 11% of corporate users in Azerbaijan faced cyber threats from the Internet and 30% faced local malware.

The interest of cybercriminals in commercial companies is explained by the fact that they have direct access to the accounts and money of the organization. This potentially provides them with more revenue than attacks on individual users. And small companies simplify the task for attackers, as they often have weaker protection against cyber threats than large enterprises and corporations.

Attackers primarily target phishing scams for attacks on corporate users. In these cases, the e-mail messages are as similar as possible to the official letters: the recipient is addressed by name, the signature contains the name of the real company and the alleged name and position of its employee, the subject of the letter corresponds to the profile of the organization. For example, an accountant of the attacked company may receive a letter with the subject "Copies of documents for April". Waiting for these files and seeing the most correct letter, the employee with a high probability will open the attachment, which eventually turns out to be malicious.

"Phishing and other cyber threats cause great damage to both companies and private users. People and organizations lose money and valuable data, risk their reputation, bear costs associated with the restoration of systems and devices,” explains Konstantin Ignatiev, head of the Content Analysts Office at Kaspersky Lab. “In order not to become a victim of phishing, we recommend users to choose security solutions with anti-phishing features and, of course, do not lose vigilance on the Internet: check the authenticity of the sender's address and the link contained in it; do not open attachments or click on links if their reliability is in doubt; do not leave personal data on suspicious pages."

Kaspersky Lab recommends organizations, including those from the segment of medium and small businesses:

to conduct trainings for employees to improve cyber literacy, which can work out practical skills of safe behavior in the digital environment;

to backup and encrypt files for added protection in case of device loss and data leakage;

to update regularly the software to avoid uncovered vulnerabilities;

to choose the right solution to protect small and medium-sized businesses with easy management and proven security features.

 

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